“Original Wound”, interview with the co director Sein Lyan Tun

“Original Wound” emerges as one of the darkest and most emotionally unsettling films of the Indonesian collaborative program Next Step Studio.

Co-directed by Myanmar filmmaker Sein Lyan Tun and Indonesian director Shelby Kho, the short film centres on a brother and sister left alone in the family house after their mother’s death. As memories resurface, grief becomes increasingly unstable, exposing emotional wounds that neither character fully understands in the same way.

For Sein Lyan Tun, the project began through a shared emotional territory discovered during the writing process with Shelby Kho.

“We were trying to find a common ground,” he explained, “We both had experiences connected to family, trauma, parents and siblings.”

That mutual recognition gradually shaped a story centred not on explicit confrontation, but on the lingering psychological effects of emotional manipulation, abuse and silence within family structures.

The film avoids definitive explanations. Instead, it constructs a fragmented emotional space where memory itself becomes unstable and contradictory.

The impossibility of a single family truth

One of the most striking aspects of “Original Wound” is the way the brother and sister remember their mother differently. Their emotional realities overlap, but never fully coincide.

For Sein Lyan Tun, this fragmentation reflects the impossibility of absolute truth inside families.

“Sometimes parents say things to make you happy,” he observed, “but when you grow up, you realise those words were painful.”

The director repeatedly returned to the idea of swallowed emotions: experiences that remain unspoken for years yet continue to shape personal identity from within.

In “Original Wound”, trauma is never presented as a completed event. Instead, it exists as an ongoing process, constantly resurfacing through memory, silence and emotional repetition.

The mother’s absence paradoxically intensifies her presence throughout the film. Even after death, her emotional influence continues to structure the relationship between the siblings, separating them even while forcing them back together.

That contradiction becomes central to the film’s emotional tension: the simultaneous desire for connection and escape.

The house as a living emotional space

The domestic setting in “Original Wound” functions almost like another character.

Throughout the interview, Sein Lyan Tun described the house less as a physical location than as an emotional environment where unresolved trauma continues to circulate.

“Sometimes you swallow things, sometimes you speak them out,” he reflected. “But the suffering continues.”

The film’s claustrophobic atmosphere reinforces this sensation of emotional entrapment. Rooms feel closed, heavy and psychologically charged, as though the past itself remains embedded within the architecture.

For the director, this dynamic also carried a broader metaphorical dimension connected to political and social realities.

Comparing family structures to authoritarian systems, he described the mother figure as resembling a form of power that cannot easily be escaped.

“The mother is like the government,” he said. “The children are like the people.”

This political undercurrent remains subtle throughout the film, but it deepens the sense that personal trauma and larger structures of control often mirror one another.

Atmosphere over explanation

Rather than relying heavily on dialogue, “Original Wound” communicates primarily through atmosphere, tension and emotional ambiguity.

Sein Lyan Tun explained that the filmmakers were less interested in providing clear psychological explanations than in creating an experiential emotional space for the audience.

The result is a film built around sensations: discomfort, emotional suffocation and the constant feeling that something unresolved remains trapped beneath the surface.

For viewers who have experienced similar family tensions, the director believes the emotional impact may feel immediately recognisable.

“Some people will watch it and say, ‘I know this pain,’” he noted.

At the same time, he acknowledged that audiences without those experiences may find the film’s emotional logic more difficult to interpret.

That uncertainty is intentional. “Original Wound” does not attempt to universalise trauma into simple catharsis. Instead, it preserves the instability and opacity that often define painful memories themselves.

Plot